


A Strongly-Worded Missive from the Narrow Place

by Seiberwing



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Agnostic Character, Alchemy, Cave-In, Claustrophobia, Established Relationship, Ishbala, Ishvala, M/M, Post-Canon, Prayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-27 04:45:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21112871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiberwing/pseuds/Seiberwing
Summary: After being trapped inside a collapsing temple of Ishvala, Miles resorts to desperate measures both alchemically and theologically.





	A Strongly-Worded Missive from the Narrow Place

Major Miles was, at this point, very used to the idea of his own death. It was a soldier thing. At Fort Briggs they'd even made a game of it, going around and describing the various colorful ways they thought their fellows would meet their end and placing fake bets on the results.

(He'd been up at Briggs so long that, like many, he'd forgotten what counted as normal back down south. No wonder his wife wound up divorcing him.)

For Miles, the expected death had been from enemy fire or frostbite, bleeding out his warmth into the bright unforgiving snow. He had not expected to die on the other side of the country from Briggs, where the sand got into every crevice it could. For that matter, he hadn't expected to die under unknown tons of stone and wood in a darkness so absolute that his mind had trouble processing it and drew idle shapes on the front of his eyeballs to cope.

They had been surveying a building that had once been a temple to Ishvala. During the War of Extermination it had been taken over and used as a base of operations for the Amestrian military, and later bombed by Ishvalan insurgents. Knowing what he did now about the war's true nature, it was entirely possible the military had done the bombing themselves to hide what was going on there and used a holy site as a base specifically to twist the knife on the Ishvalans further. When the entire point of a war was death on either side, a lot was on the table.

One moment Miles had been walking across a seemingly secure floor covered in rubble and burnt paper. The next, he'd been falling, stone scraping across his skin as he tumbled for what felt like an eternity and was likely only a minute or two. When gravity started behaving again he'd found himself alone and battered in utter blackness.

Miles crept along the edges of the darkness, mapping it out with his hands. His own heartbeat sounded unbearably loud in his eardrums, and each breath seemed to echo.. By touch, he determined he was in a space about the size of two bathroom stalls--from the slight slickness on the floor it might even have _been_ two bathroom stalls.

He could hear nothing outside of the occasional sound of shifting gravel and sand, and had no idea how far down he was. If anyone was trying to dig him out, he had no way to tell them where he was.

Miles shouted a few times, just to get it out of the way.The rocks were tight enough to smother sound and block out light - probably enough so to trap the air, too. Screaming would be a waste of oxygen. So would lighting one of the matches he had in his pocket, even if the darkness felt like it was crushing him. The best thing to do was to sit perfectly still, use as little air as possible, and wait to be rescued.

Great.

There were two parts of Miles, the part that panicked and the part that got down to work. Usually the second part was the strongest, leaving Panicked Miles to make soft whimpering noises in the background that didn't disturb Responsible Miles getting his job done. Now, with nothing to do but sit very quietly in pitch darkness, Panicked Miles was starting to get louder.

It could be worse, he told himself. He'd trained for surviving an avalanche, and at least here he wasn't in danger of freezing to death. Much less damp, too. Definitely would be worse to be in an avalanche, where the very warmth of his body against melting snow might cause him to be crushed to death.

At least he knew what to do about an avalanche.

Miles found a corner and closed his eyes, the better to not see the darkness. He reached out for a soothing image - the routine of cleaning his rifle. Miles went through every step carefully in his mind, as meticulously as if he were doing it in the real world. For a few minutes it really did work…and then he ran out of imaginary gun to clean. The second time he mentally recited the pattern it was less effective.

Anything repetitive, like reciting one of the little chants he'd learned in grade school about geography or chemistry, made his mind wander too much. Instead, Miles tried to imagine he was somewhere else entirely. Somewhere bright and warm, certainly. The house he was currently sharing with Scar while they worked on the Ishvalan rebuilding effort, for example.

Miles focused on being where he could see the sun coming through the window, illuminating sun-bronzed skin and soft blankets.

In his mind he traced the lines of alchemical tattoos, the arches he'd passed over first with his eyes, then his fingertips, and then after so much careful waiting his lips. He pictured every dark line and carefully inked character in his mind, from shoulder down to wrist and back up again, fingers moving across his own arm in sympathy. Despite how short a time he'd known the man now called Scar, he almost felt that he could reconstruct them from memory, just from how many times he'd gone over those elegant patterns with such intense focus.

Miles's eyes flashed open. One hand began to dig frantically for the matches in his pocket.

Actually, there was nothing 'almost' about it, was there?

\----

Miles cursed as the match in his hand burned down to his fingertips, and reluctantly shook it out. _Almost finished_, he noted to himself, and resignedly struck the next match on the box. It flared up across the partially inscribed circle crudely marked into what had once been a chunk of the floor above him.

The half-broken chalk in Miles's fingertips, originally intended for marking inspected buildings for census, scraped along the rough stone as Miles inscribed out a copy of Scar's right arm. Each match got him a little further along in its construction, but also ate up another chunk of precious air. He was down to his last two by the time he finished, and had only a moment to review the entire thing before the third-to-last flared out and died in his hand.

Of course Scar was probably going to kill him once he found out he was doing alchemy inside the village. In a temple of Ishvala, of all places. That was probably double heresy. Miles liked to think Ishvala understood the concept of 'desperate times call for desperate measures' but to be fair he'd never asked.

The tattoo on Scar's right arm had the circles necessary for destructive alchemy, the one he'd used to take apart walls and floors (and the occasional human head) back in his wanted serial killer days. It was the first technique Scar had learned and probably the easiest to use in the given situation. Miles didn't have to change one thing to another to get out of here, just take apart the stone above him.

Anyone could do alchemy with enough training and equipment, right? Scar was self-taught. The Elrics were literal children when they became masters of the field. This wasn't even transmutation, either. All Miles had to do was take apart one measly pile of rocks-turn sandstone into just sand.

Miles carefully raised his hands and placed them where he assumed the middle of the circle to be. Just one big pile of stone. Stone into pebbles. Come apart. Just come apart. You don't have to be another thing, just the same thing in smaller pieces. Come apart.

The wall stayed firm beneath his palms as he focused every iota of his thought into the image of the huge blocks of stone becoming a shower of flowing sand. His brow furrowed so deep it made his head hurt. Still, the stone remained firm beneath his fingers.

Mile's hands slowly slid down the stone and fell to his sides. A miserable sound, the first he'd let slip past his lips since he started drawing, finally left his mouth as he fell to his knees.

Nothing.

Maybe his memory was wrong. Maybe the circle was smudged. Or maybe this entire thing was pointless and he'd burned up his air chasing the fantasy that an uneducated soldier could do alchemy based on hazy memories of a former terrorist's tattooed arm and what little about alchemy he remembered from grade school.

Deprived of movement, of any way to go forward, he found himself sliding down into despair, curling into a ball with his head against his knees. There were no backup orders to follow, no next steps or emergency procedures. Nothing to do but wait, and maybe die, not even anyone to reach out to for help. Going from living in a large metal box full of fellow soldiers to being the only soldier in a scattered village had been rough but right now he couldn't remember a time he'd felt so damn alone. 

Nothing left to do but...well. It couldn't hurt at this point, he supposed. 

Miles sat up straighter, knees bent underneath him. The air already felt thin in his lungs, though it might be his imagination. 

Scar, notably, had never prayed in Miles's presence. He had cut himself from Ishvala through his crimes and through the sin written on his arms. There would be no point in prayer - it would be like an unpleasant neighbor coming to ask to borrow a cup of flour. Even the asking would be an infraction.

Miles had never asked him whether a heretic whose Ishvalan heritage was all on the outside but nowhere in his heart was allowed to pray. What little vestiges of his grandfather's home culture had come north with him a near-century ago mainly exposed themselves in cooking or swearing. In his time with Scar he'd seen other Ishvalans pray, but no one had bothered to translate exactly what was being chanted.

Miles had learned to identify a few of the more common prayers - this one was a gratitude for salvation from harm, that one was a plea for mercy in the face of human sin, and so on, but most of the words were still unfamiliar. He'd focused his attention on learning functional phrases rather than religious ones, and there had always felt like more important tasks for him to be doing than speaking words to the air in a language he barely understood - leave the prayer to those skilled at it, and Miles would handle his own areas of expertise.

_I'd like to avoid wasting my air on speech. They say you can read men's thoughts like pages in a book so I'm going to just think this in my head._ Too presumptuous? Perhaps every request was presumptuous to a god.

Miles tried to picture something to direct his intentions towards. Some kind of authority figure, both parent and judge, one who saw through to the truth of all matters. Annoyingly, his brain immediately spit out an image of General Armstrong up on the Fort Briggs southern wall, looking down at him imperiously. 

_They'd probably both be offended by the comparison_, thought Miles. He shook it off and resignedly replaced it with an image of his Ishvalan grandfather. The man had died long before the War of Extermination, which was likely a blessing, and before Miles was even in the army at all. He rarely had much to say about his own religious heritage and most of it was the idle complaint about his countrymens' superstition and myth. Miles wondered now how much was real resentment and how much was just trying to fit in - to not seem like one of 'those' Ishvalans but just an Amestrian with strange eyes.

At least Miles's grandfather, even in Amestrian clothing and sitting in his favorite armchair, was probably a better fit for Ishvala than a blonde Amestrian officer. 

_I have a petition for you, sir_, Miles thought, in the general direction of the image._ I am about to commit an act of heresy in a desecrated temple to you and I recognize that makes this the absolute worst time to ask for your support on this venture, but this is a particularly dire situation._

He could picture Captain Buccaneer giving him a hard elbow and joking that he said prayers like he wrote supply requests to Central. 

_I do not ask this for myself. My connection to this land and this people is in my skin and my hair and my eyes, but precious little of it is found in my soul. I was not born here, I was not raised to be one of your followers. I fight for the army that once slaughtered them and wear their uniform. To many here I must seem like a traitor._

_(Come on, Major Miles, _laughed the Buccaneer in his head. _This is how you bargain, by cutting off your own feet at the first statement? Make a better pitch than that!)_

Miles curled his fingers closed against his knees.

_I ask on behalf of the man we now call Scar. He is one of yours, as much as he claims he is a heretic. He loves you, though he thinks you have turned away from him, and he has done good work in your name. And he has lost so much. He has been so alone, in a way I could never imagine, even in this place. Now he is growing again, beginning to see himself as more than a dead man walking. Please forgive me this final heresy for the sake of my life, and permit me my life for the sake of that man's happiness. Please let me climb out of this tomb._

And, because talking to officers was the closest Miles usually came to talking to the divine, he closed with, _Thank you for your time, sir _and a tiny forward bow. He ignored the way his internal Buccaneer roared with laughter at it.

He took a deep breath and lit the second to last match, covering his eyes against the first flare-up. As his eyes adjusted he saw the pale circle, still on a wall as solid as ever. Miles held the match up, eyes following each line in turn. 

Maybe he just couldn't do alchemy at all.

Maybe this was a stupid idea.

Maybe he had used up the air for nothing.

Maybe he'd have been rescued if he hadn't devoted himself to the insane idea that he could do alchemy with no training.

"Ah!" Miles nearly dropped the match in his frantic joy. The upper right segment of the drawing had been smudged, leaving an unfinished curve. Miles rushed to finish it, and gave the entire diagram one final check, placing his left hand in the center before dropping the match so the right hand could join it.

_Again, sir, my apologies for this infraction. But I don't want to leave him alone again._

What did you offer a god, when you didn't have a sacrifice? A worshipper.

All right. One more try.

\----

The explosion from the basement of the temple ruins was loud enough to be heard in the next settlement over, with debris flying almost a kilometer away. Some of the elders were sure that the war had restarted and ran for hiding or for makeshift weaponry, while the children raced to see what the excitement was. Those closest to the blast barely avoided concussion via airborne pebbles.

The first person to arrive found Major Miles on his knees in front of a crater nearly a meter in diameter and five meters deep. He was bleeding from scrapes on his face and arms where sand had breezed past it at high velocity. The abrupt sunlight was so bright he couldn't keep his eyes open, and the explosion had left him temporarily deafened. Miles only realized that anyone else was present when strong hands took him by the arms and shook him until his body wobbled. 

_Either I'm alive or Ishvala has a very firm grip._

His dry lips mouthed words, but the only ones he could turn into sound were "Where is Scar?"

The powerful arms stopped shaking him. Instead, two powerful callused hands came to rest on either side of his face, giving Miles his answer. As his eyes slowly squinted open, he saw two red eyes, usually so stoic, now full of fear in a stony face made soft by worry.

"I apologize," Miles croaked. Scar said something that was probably akin to 'that was incredibly dangerous and inappropriate, don't ever do that again', his ears were still ringing too loudly, and then Miles was crushed into his arms. Weak, scuffed fingers rested on the inked places near Scar's forearms.

Miles felt his hearing begin to return. The voices of the search team were a muffled clamor around him, but they were drowned out by the soft, thick voice right next to his cheek. As the ringing in his ears died out the sound resolved itself into coherent words - not ones he understood, not fully, but that still brought a warm smile across his weary face.

It was the prayer of thanks for deliverance.

**Author's Note:**

> (Shows up in the fandom 15 years late with Starbucks) Rarepairs? Anyone want some rarepairs?
> 
> The title comes from a line in Psalm 118 ("Min Ha-meitzar karati Yah, Anani b’merchav Yah"/"From the narrow place I called out to God; God answered me within the expanse"), because it's just past Yom Kippur and I spent like half my time in services distracted by these two war-weary dorks.


End file.
